


and all my world is losing light

by Clones_and_gallifrey



Series: we keep this love in a photograph [1]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, Pregnancy, Sorry Not Sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-06 02:11:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11026416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clones_and_gallifrey/pseuds/Clones_and_gallifrey
Summary: "Day one is listening to Captain Holt telling them not to give up hope, but then overhearing him calling Karen, and telling her in a quiet voice that her son has been sentenced to 15 years, telling her not to cry. Day one is spent filled with fear, and tears, and she punches a wall in their bedroom (because it is still theirs) so hard that the skin on her knuckles splits open. Day one is a cold side of the bed and a thick silence filling up the space where Jake used to be. Day one is overwhelming, plain and simple."There are over five-thousand days in fifteen years. It takes Amy ten of them to figure it out.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I sat down at my computer to write something short, and well this happened! I'm blaming Federica for encouraging me.

It takes Amy ten days, post-sentencing (because that’s how she is separating her days now, into the days when Jake was free and into the days where he isn’t), for her to find out. They are a long ten days, and she has crammed in a spectrum of emotions usually reserved for much longer periods of time, but even so she will look back in the future and wonder how it took her _that long._

Day one is listening to Captain Holt telling them not to give up hope, but then overhearing him calling Karen, and telling her in a quiet voice that her son has been sentenced to 15 years, telling her not to cry. Day one is spent filled with fear, and tears, and she punches a wall in their bedroom (because it is still _theirs_ ) so hard that the skin on her knuckles splits open. Day one is a cold side of the bed and a thick silence filling up the space where Jake used to be. Day one is overwhelming, plain and simple.

Day two sees a pool of desperation settle in Amy’s stomach, where it will take up residence for the foreseeable future, frequently accompanied by the sheer panic which tangles around her spine. She hasn’t heard from Jake yet, and she isn’t allowed to visit him until day seven. It’s been almost a year since Florida, the last time she had to go a year without seeing him, but this time she can’t picture him standing in the sunshine with Captain Holt. This time there will only be cold concrete and metal bars and Jake being so _alone._ It’s this thought that pushes Amy into action. She leaves her apartment and takes up residence at her desk in the Nine-Nine, not leaving until the early hours of day five.

The money is proving harder to trace back to Hawkins than Amy first thought it might be. Sure, Charles’ hacker has managed to trace it back to the farm, but that’s where the trail goes cold, and then Wednesday’s closes for the weekend so it brings everything to a standstill. Day two is all of them gathered in the briefing room and making a plan of action, committing to find a way out of this, but by day four they have all tapered away, one by one. Terry to pick the twins up from school, Captain Holt to feed Cheddar, Gina to another appointment, and Charles leaving quietly and promising to be back after he has fixed what he calls ‘another wolf pee incident’ in a high-pitched tone.

Amy gives it until three a.m., trawling through old witness statements involving any mention of Hawkins, but then Captain Holt returns and catches her eyes fluttering shut, head falling forward almost enough to slam her forehead on the desk.

“Go home, Santiago,” he tells her, placing a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m ok,” Amy responds defiantly, even though her voice is hoarse through lack of use, and her eyes are stinging so much she can barely see.

“The best thing you can do is to come back in the morning with a clear head,” he says, and she knows it’s true as she hears the words, but the thought of going back to the empty apartment, to the bed which is too large now, to the thought of Jake in his cell all alone _._ It’s too much.

She can’t shake the last memory she has of his face. The one where he is being escorted away from her, flanked by armed guards. The fear in his eyes, and the silent _I love you, I love you, I love you_. She wants to replace it with a happier picture of him – literally, any one of the happier ones, even the picture of him from high school with the nose ring, saved on her phone. But the bad memory is imprinted on the back of her eyelids, and if she closes her eyes to go to sleep then it’s going to haunt her.

“I’m so close now, Sir,” Amy insists, jabbing a finger at her computer screen in emphasis. “I’m in 2006 now, I just… let me just…” She tries to close the window and bring up another, but the screen freezes, and no amount of clicking or ctrl-alt-deleting will un-freeze it.

“Amy.” Captain Holt draws her attention back to him. “We’re going to get them out. Let me drive you home. I’ll be here all night, Boyle is on his way back in. When you get back, we’ll have something new to brief you on.” Amy looks up at him, fuzzy through her exhausted eyes.

“You really think it’s going to be ok?” She asks, her voice sounding distant to her own ears.

“I do,” he manages a half-smile.

Amy lets him drive her home and watches his car fade away from her window. She makes a list in her head instead of dwelling on the silence in the apartment. Practicality has never failed her before, so that’s what she relies on now, making a list of actions and then executing them. She heats up a can of chicken noodle soup, eats it quickly, cleans up the kitchen, takes a shower, and then falls into bed. She means to go to sleep, she really does, but the other side of the bed smells like Jake, and there are tears rolling down her cheeks before she knows it. She finds one of his hoodies, crumpled up on the ground by his side of the bed, remembering grumbling at him to pick it up last week. But it may as well be in a different lifetime now. It takes her a while, but she falls asleep wrapped up in it.

\--

Days five and six see the desperation turning into nausea and dizziness. Amy wakes up with good intentions to drink copious amounts of coffee and then drag herself back to the precinct, but the first sip almost makes her gag, so she tips it into the sink and goes on with her day with no caffeine.

“What did you find?” Amy corners Terry as soon as she enters the precinct on day six. Day five had been useless, but she had gone home for a couple hours sleep in between days this time. The nausea is only getting worse – she’s putting it down to the constant state of tension and the added nerves from knowing she is going to see Jake tomorrow in _that place_. From knowing that she can’t bring her home with him, and knowing that at this rate, she won’t have any good news to tell him.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” The Sarge asks her, frowning as she approaches.

“Kind of. Why?” She frowns right back at him.

“You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine,” she tries to keep her voice as upbeat as possible. She doesn’t need everyone to know that she feels like she’s got a permanent hangover from hell. “Where’s Charles?” She asks, scanning the room to see if she can find him.

“There was a murder. Gang related,” Terry tells her.

“Oh.” For a while there, Amy had almost forgotten that they were supposed to be working other cases. None of it seems very relevant right now.

“Seems like it’ll be pretty open and shut,” he shrugs.

“Do you need me to go out and help?” Amy offers, half hoping that Terry tells her yes so she won’t have to stare at dead end after dead end for another day.

“No,” he shakes his head. “Boyle’s got it covered.”

Amy nods and walks back to her desk, mentally preparing herself for another day of reading pages and pages of text to try and find something, anything which will stand out to her. They’ve left one of the hackers on the case too, with instructions to call if they find anything at all, but there is nothing as yet. It’s just hopeless day after hopeless day.

Boyle comes back an hour later and asks her to borrow her for a second set of eyes to look over some security camera footage from the scene from earlier on in the day. They know it was gang related, but they are yet to identify a specific suspect, and Amy agrees because the sooner the case is closed, the sooner they can both get back to Jake and Rosa’s case. She’s hoping he won’t see how sick she looks, and it’s only when she gets up to pee for the third time in a thirty-five-minute window that he says something.

“Nervous drinker, huh?” He nods at the empty cup in front of her as she stands up. “I have some Icelandic tea that might help. I always keep a sachet in my car, I’ll be right back.” Amy groans into her hands.

“Santiago,” Captain Holt catches her on the way to the bathroom, the same sombre expression now ever-present on his face.

“Captain?”

“I trust you’re going to visit Peralta and Diaz tomorrow morning?” He asks.

“Yeah. I just wish I had some good news to bring them.”

“We’re all still fighting for them. And we w _ill_ get them out,” Captain Holt reminds her, as he does every single day. She keeps hearing everyone saying it, but it’s getting harder and harder to believe. He surveys her for a few seconds. “I know that Karen was planning to go tomorrow morning. You should give her a call and arrange something. I’m sure she’d appreciate the support,” he says, with a knowing look.

\--

That’s how, the next morning (day seven), Amy finds herself driving to the medium security facility where Jake and Rosa are held, Karen riding shotgun with her fingers drumming nervously on the seat.

“How’s it going – the case?” Karen asks as soon as she has fastened her seatbelt.

“It’s dead end after dead end,” Amy sighs, checking in the rear view mirror and pulling away from the sidewalk.

“I just can’t _believe_ this happened,” Karen shakes her head. “I know he’s an adult, but I’m his mom and I’m supposed to... I’m supposed to be able to _do something_.” Amy can tell that she is close to tears. She stops the car at a red light at the end of the street and reaches across the console to squeeze Karen’s hand.

“I know,” Amy says softly, trying her hardest to quell the lump in her own throat.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Karen squeezes Amy’s hand right back. “He loves you so much.”

“We’re getting him out,” Amy tells Karen, a fresh brand of determination in her voice. If she says anything else, she thinks she might start crying again and never, ever stop.

\--

When Amy was an inmate in Texas it was all ok, because she knew that Jake and Charles, and then just Charles, were watching out for her. That they could pull her out if anything went wrong, or that she could ask to leave if it all got too much. She walked into that prison confidently, with the nerves in her stomach overruled by the knowledge that she was doing some inherently good, something worthwhile. She’s walked into countless other prisons before, too, to interview a perp or for a prisoner transfer, with no second thought. So why is it that, now, she is standing on the sidewalk in front of a similar metal gate, and her feet won’t move? Karen is standing at her side, a hand curled around Amy’s arm, and all they have to do is step through and head to the security check. They’ve watched an assortment of people already flowing in for visiting hours – a family of four, a woman with teardrop tattoos trailing down her cheek, an older couple in a shouting match – in the five minutes that they have been standing on the sidewalk.

“What if he’s different? What if he bumped into one of the murderers he threw in there? What if he just doesn’t want to see me?” Amy runs through a list of potential outcomes out loud, her eyes wild. Karen had her freak out in the car, and now it’s Amy’s turn.

“Sweetie, he’ll be ok,” Karen assures her in a voice which lacks certainty. “If something had happened, they would have called us. He’s probably just as nervous about seeing you.”

“He probably thinks I have some good news to bring him,” Amy bites down hard on her lower lip, digs her fingernails into her palms and wishes with all of her strength that there was a way out of this. A way out of the love of her life being stuck behind bars. Maybe if the persistent nausea would just _stop_ , she could think with a clear head again, and find a way out of it herself. All she can see, yet again, is Jake’s face as he was taken away, his eyes. And she is supposed to be doing better for him, but her brain is all fogged up with sickness. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“I know how you feel,” Karen sighs.

“No, Karen, I actually think I’m going to throw up,” Amy snaps back to reality, looking around for a trash can or a bush or anything to stop her from having to throw up on the sidewalk.

“Oh!” Karen reaches into her purse and bulls out a neatly folded paper bag, tearing it open and handing it to Amy. “I was going to go to the farmers market after. I hate those plastic bags they give out,” she explains, as Amy coughs up her breakfast.

“Do you have any gum in there, too?” She asks, after.

“I have some mints!” Karen smiles, feeling around in the side pocket of her purse and coming up with an orange tin. She tips two of white mints into Amy’s outstretched hand. “Are you sick?”

“I guess so,” Amy replies, wiping a stray tear from her face. “But I’m ready to go in now.” Suddenly, she needs to see Jake more than ever.

\--

They find Jake at a table in the corner of the room, and as soon as Amy’s eyes land on him it’s like she can breathe again, like she has surfaced from the depths of the ocean. His hair is all messed up and he’s paler than usual, he looks more tired too, but he’s there. Physical, living proof that he’s ok. And he is no longer out of reach, either. Visitors are allowed one hug at the beginning of visitation and one at the end, and they have to fit days and days of longing and sadness and loneliness into them. It’s an impossible feat, but Amy throws her arms around him and buries her face in his shoulder and she’s damn well going to try. She feels his arms circle around her back, drawing her closer, his breath warm and lost in her hair.

“You’re here,” he whispers as she breathes him in. He smells strange, the clinical smell she can only identify as _prison_ , but he is warm and solid and not covered in bruises as she had imagined.

“I missed you,” she whispers back.

They only pull apart when a nearby guard yells at them to separate, and even then it’s difficult to let go.

“Are you ok?” She asks him as she steps back, surveying his face carefully for any signs of recent injury.

“I’m hanging in there,” he says, reaching out to touch her before he remembers that he can’t. His arm hangs in the air until Karen steps forward and takes her turn for a hug.

“My sweet boy,” Karen sways him gently and his head drops to her shoulder.

“I’m alright, mom,” he tells her before they let go.

They sit on opposite sides of the table, the tips of their shoes touching underneath. They get one hour, and after quickly ascertaining that Jake doesn’t’ want to talk about prison, beyond assuring them that he’s ok, Amy updates him on the case against Hawkins, relaying Captain Holt’s promises that even though they haven’t found anything concrete yet, they won’t stop until they do. After that they talk about mundane things, trying to make Jake feel some semblance of normality. Amy tells him about Boyle’s Icelandic tea, Karen tells him about a party she threw with the lesbians across the street to welcome a new neighbour.

And then the hour is up, and Amy is hugging him goodbye, uttering _I love you_ into his collar bone. Jake gets four one-hour visits per month, so she’s going to have to wait a whole week to see him again. Day fourteen. She did the math on the day he was sentenced, and figured out that there are over five-thousand-four-hundred days in fifteen years. She won’t stop fighting for him until all of those days are spent.

\--

They visit Rosa next, in the women’s wing of the same penitentiary. Karen has known Rosa since she and Jake were at the academy together, so is as eager to make sure she’s ok as Amy is. Amy knows that Rosa isn’t a hugger, but when she enters the visitation room to find Rosa staring resolutely at the ground, a gash on her forehead, she can’t help but throw her arms around her friend.

“What happened to you?” Amy asks, stepping backwards after a few seconds.

“It’s fine. You should see the other guy,” Rosa says, her voice sounding all wrong. She folds her arms and sitting down.

“What happened?” Karen asks, reaching the table. “Are you hurt?”

“It doesn’t matter. It won’t happen again,” Rosa growls. But when she looks up, Amy sees the same fear in her eyes that she saw in Jake’s.

\--

The visits ignite fresh waves of anger in Amy, and she spends days eight and nine both catching up on the heap of paperwork she has been neglecting, and forming the semblance of an idea in her mind which she convinces herself is going to free Jake and Rosa. Jake is also finally able to buy phone credit, resulting in a ten minute call. It’s the best thing in the world to hear his voice again, even if he does sound tinny and far away and the call is permeated by some people have a loud argument on his end.

But then her sickness gets worse, accompanied by thudding headaches and a desire to throw the nearest blunt object at Charles whenever he brings in his latest culinary invention for lunch. By the end of day nine she is googling her symptoms and shaking her head at the computer screen, and the morning of day ten has her standing in the drug store down the street from her apartment, staring at a shelf of rectangular boxes. She researched the best brand early this morning, unable to get back to sleep. She’s sure it’s nothing, just a bunch of random symptoms, maybe a stress related thing or a rare new disease. But just in case, she picks up a box, hands over some crumpled dollar bills, and walks home as fast as she can without breaking into a run.

Day ten brings a little pink plus sign and Amy Santiago cussing at her reflection in the mirror.

She tells herself it’s a false positive. It has to be. The universe wouldn’t be that cruel. It wouldn’t take away the love of her life and then leave her alone, trying to fix it, and throw _this_ into the mix. She goes back to the drug store after work that day and buys all of the pregnancy tests they have – eight – and tries not to care when the clerk shoots her an odd look as he rings them up. She’s sure that the next test, or the one after that, will be negative (she has never wanted to fail a test so badly before), but when she does her makeup ready to go and see Jake and Rosa for a second time, days later, there are nine positive tests lining the bathroom counter.

Gina comes along with Amy and Karen this time, her bump growing ever bigger, her grey t-shirt stretching tight over her belly. Gina sits in the front seat and every time they stop at a red light or behind a queue of traffic, Amy glances down at it. She still doesn’t believe the tests. There has to be something else wrong with her, something causing all of the tests to turn positive. But during the journey, glancing over at Gina’s hands, resting atop the bump lightly, Amy allows herself to wonder whether they’re telling the truth. Whether there really is an actual _baby_ growing inside of her at that very moment. It doesn’t feel real in any way, but she wonders when Gina’s baby began to feel real to her. If she thinks about it, it makes sense that something that she can’t see or feel yet wouldn’t seem real. Maybe something not feeling real doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t exist.

Amy almost makes it without throwing up, but then she thinks about how, if the tests were right, she’s going to have to tell Jake at some point. And that, even though it isn’t his fault, he will never, ever forgive himself. Because sure, they’re trying their damn hardest to get him out, but what if, w _hat if,_ they don’t? He wouldn’t be there to see the baby being born, or watch them learn to roll over or take their first steps, wouldn’t be there to hold their hand on their first day of school. Thinking about that is enough to make Amy tear herself from the car as soon as she has pulled into the parking lot, but this time there is a trash can.

“Amy?” Karen’s concern is audible in her voice as she rushes towards her. Gina is slower, struggling to get out of the passenger side and cross to the other side of the car. “You’re sick again?” Karen rubs Amy’s back as she groans into the trash can.

“Again?” Gina questions, pulling Amy’s hair back from her face.

Karen hands her another mint as she stands up, and it all feels like too much, standing in the parking lot with the weight of the world on her shoulders. The tears come before she can stop them, and she is angrily rubbing them away with the heel of her hand.

“Is it an anxiety thing? Do you need some tea? I-“

“No! Please, no more tea,” Amy cuts Karen off, thinking of the tea Boyle had offered her which, if anything, had just made things worse. Amy pushes away more tears, trying her hardest to control her breathing and stop the tears. Jake would know what to do. And if he didn’t, he would draw her in close and tell that everything was going to be ok, and she would believe him. But now, even though he’s just across the street in the prison, he may as well be a thousand miles away. And she can’t tell him anything, and he can’t make anything ok.

“Wait a second,” Gina raises her index finger, eyes darting between Amy’s face and her stomach. “Are you-“

“Don’t,” Amy stops her. She knows exactly what Gina is about to say, but she doesn’t want her to. Doesn’t want to make it any more real. Nothing has felt all that real since the guilty verdict, so maybe, just maybe, this is some weird fever dream, and she will wake up any minute to her nice, normal life. But if not, is it really going to hurt to pretend for a little longer?

“Amy?” Karen is only growing more concerned. The three stand in silence around the trash can, Amy crunching the mint and refusing to meet their eyes. She concentrates on the mint, and manages to stop the tears, breathing in the warm air.

“I’ve taken nine tests,” she admits suddenly, surprising even herself. “And they were all positive. And I… I don’t know what to do now.”

“You’re pregnant?” Karen checks in disbelief.

“According to nine, potentially faulty, tests,” Amy shrugs.

“Oh my God, Amy, nine of them?” Gina is laughing, and a smile has found its way onto Karen’s lips, and Amy wants the ground to swallow her whole.

“Does Jake know?” Karen asks.

“No! And I can’t tell him! You know he’d never forgive himself.”

“What are you gonna do?” Is Gina’s next question.

“What do you mean?” Amy asks, confused.

“I mean you don’t have to have the baby. If you don’t want to,” Gina explains, her expression growing apprehensive.

Amy hasn’t thought about that, if she’s honest. She’s been too busy trying to convince herself that it isn’t happening, and wondering how she’ll cope if it is. She’s never even considered that she has options other than doing this, than raising a baby potentially by herself. But now that she does, now that she takes a second to consider the alternatives, she just can’t picture herself doing anything other than (she takes another steadying breath) having the baby.

She nods at them once, dabbing the remains of the tears from her face with her sleeve. She’s terrified, and everything feels very surreal, but she feels her heart flutter when she nods at them, and then they are both embracing her, Gina’s bump getting in the way and Karen squeezing her shoulder too tight.

It’s hard to pretend everything is normal with Jake and Rosa, after that, but they do, and then visitation is over for another week all too soon.

Later that day, Amy schedules two things: a doctor’s appointment, and a meeting with the best defence attorney she knows.

\--

The doctor’s appointment comes around first, and whilst she knows there’s a whole bunch of people she could ask to come with her, she chooses to go alone. It feels wrong, the thought of doing this with someone other than Jake. The waiting room in the doctor’s office is busy when she gets there, her stomach a ball of nerves and a dull ache in her lower back. She notices stuff she never has before, like the weirdly specific titles of the pamphlets available on the reception desk about pregnancy and babies, and that there are posters on the wall telling her about foods she shouldn’t eat, and not to leave your baby in a hot car. She rolls her eyes at that one – everyone knows not to leave a dog in a hot car, why would it be any different for a baby? There’s food she never even considered she wouldn’t be able to eat on the poster, though, so she makes a note to pick up as many pamphlets as she can on the way out, and plans a visit to the bookstore in the near future.

There’s a little boy with wild hair and a scab on his chin sitting with his mom, who is reading him a book as he watches her with adoring eyes. Amy doesn’t think he can be any older than two, and the quiet picture of the two on the edge of the room makes her smile, makes her think that maybe this whole thing is possible. The illusion is shattered five minutes later when the boy throws the book across the room, but by then Amy is being called in to see the doctor, and she is too terrified to dwell on it.

The doctor confirms it in an upbeat voice, tells Amy congratulations. They work out that she’s around seven weeks and the doctor gives her a due date. A _concrete_ date, just over seven months from now, when all of this will have no choice but to feel real. Amy is handed a prescription for pre-natal vitamins and some medication to help with the sickness, and then she picks up a stack of pamphlets on the way out and makes a new appointment with the receptionist. And then she makes her way back to the precinct, buzzing with the confirmation that she is growing an actual, real human being, who will be here in seven short months whether she likes it or not.

She’s back at her desk with a real smile on her face. It feels strange, this glimmer of happiness. She’s terrified, of course, and creating lists in her mind of the hundreds of things she needs to do – at the top there is the question of when she should tell Jake, written in red flashing letters. Amy even has the crazy idea of just not telling him while he’s still behind bars, but she rules it out after a stressful thirty seconds of wondering how she would go about hiding the bump when it got too big. There’s a whole list dedicated to people she needs to tell – aside from Jake, she’s the most terrified about telling Captain Holt and then her parents, in that order.

There are two people, however, who she can share today’s news with, and she corners Gina in the break room.

“So,” Amy begins, pointing at her stomach, “I guess this is happening.” Gina looks up from her strawberry milkshake (she drinks three a day with a straw, resting the cups on her bump, and Amy is dreading the day her own cravings set in now).

“You’re really having Jake’s kid?” Gina asks, a smile growing on her face now, too.

“Mmhmm,” Amy nods, and shows Gina the due date from where she has input it into her phone’s calendar.

“You better rest up, sister. That kid’s going to be a Sagittarius,” Gina tells Amy apologetically.

“I think I can handle it,” Amy assures her. She’s sure that she can handle whatever life throws at her. She’s come this far. 

\--

If it’s possible, Amy is even more nervous about her meeting with Sophia Perez than she was for the doctor’s appointment. This time, instead of baby posters and moms reading to kids, the walls are blank and there are three men in suits having a whispered discussion in the corner. There’s also a water feature which Amy thinks is supposed to be calming, but it’s just making her need to pee.

Amy is escorted through to Sophia’s office by a tall, red-haired man, and told to sit and wait at her desk. She wants to ask where the bathroom is but it seems rude to do so, so she busies herself gathering the papers from her bag and spreading them out on the desk in front of her. This, along with the information on the memory stick in her pocket, is everything she has on Hawkins, everything which might, in the hands of the right person who knows where to look next, mean freedom for Jake and Rosa.

Sophia enters the room two minutes later, engrossed in something on her phone.

“Sorry I’m late, I was in a meeting and-“ Sophia rounds the desk and looks up from her phone. Clearly, Amy thinks, Sophia hadn’t been looking at the name of her next client on that phone. She stops, mouth open a little. “Amy Santiago?”

“That’s me,” Amy tells her, surprised by the high pitch of her own voice.

“What are you doing here?” Sophia asks, looking around the room as if she expects to be ambushed any moment.

“I needed help from the best defence attorney I know,” Amy explains.

“Amy, I’m flattered but…” Sophia appears to be lost for words. “Why do you need a defence attorney?” She asks, finally sitting in the plush leather office chair behind her desk.

“Jake’s in trouble,” Amy says, pushing the papers in front of her towards Sophia, who reaches for them and scans her eyes across them.

“Wait, _Jake_ got arrested?” Sophia asks in disbelief, looking up momentarily from the top document.

“Wrongfully!” Amy adds quickly

“But he’s… well he’s a really good guy.”

“I know,” Amy says in a small voice. Sophia looks up at her again, studying her like she had just been studying the papers.

“Are you guys a thing now?” Sophia asks. For a moment, Amy is reluctant to say yes, worried that it might bring back memories of the Maple Drip Inn from a whole lifetime ago, that it might make Sophia realise that Jake had started loving Amy a year previously and never really stopped. But then she just nods, preparing herself for whatever comes next. “Well, good for you,” Sophia says, and there is a warmth to her voice that Amy didn’t expect. “I’m glad he got the girl.”

“Thanks,” Amy says, a little uncertain.

“How long did it take? After we broke up?” Sophia asks.

“Uh, a few months,” Amy is even more uncertain now.

“He was never really over you, I know that,” Sophia says.

“He loved you, though. It was hard for him to get over you.”

“Well, him and me? We just weren’t a good fit. And now he has you, and I have someone new, too,” Sophia says.

“You do?”

“His name is Dean and I… should not be telling you this,” Sophia laughs a little, shaking her head. “I’m not going to hold it against you, Amy, I’m not a sixteen-year-old-girl. I’m glad you guys are happy, is what I’m trying to say. Or you were, until he got sent to prison,” Sophia winces, looking back down at the papers. “So do you want to tell me about why he’s in there?” Amy clears her throat, and tells her the whole story.

\--

She’s typing up notes that evening on how best to tell her parents that she’s pregnant when her cell phone rings, and she answers to hear the robotic voice telling her that an inmate is trying to contact her. She quickly presses the number which will accept the call, and listens to the steady beep as the call connects.

“Amy?” It’s Jake, still sounding far away. She wants to tell him, right now, that he is going to be a dad.

“Hey babe,” she smiles into the phone, closing her eyes. If she tries hard enough, she can pretend he’s working late, that he’s calling to see if she wants him to pick anything up for dinner on his way back.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” he tells her. She imagines him leaned up against a cold wall in a corridor, black prison phone in hand. The image makes her heart hurt.

“Yours too. Are you ok?” She always checks that first. If he’s ok, then they can get through this.

“Yeah. I got a new cellmate,” he says. She takes it as a good sign that he doesn’t sound altogether displeased about that.

“What happened to your old cellmate?” She doesn’t remember Jake telling her anything about an old cellmate because of his, understandable, reluctance to talk about anything to do with being in prison.

“He got transferred to solitary. Apparently he tried to bite a guy’s ear off,” there is a little amusement in Jake’s voice.

“Not _your_ ear?” Amy checks.

“No,” he laughs a little, just for a second, and it’s like music to Amy’s ears. “I’m no George Weasley.”

“Thank God,” Amy laughs a little, too. This is the first remotely normal conversation they’ve had since the ‘before’ part of her life. “So what’s the new guy like?”

“He’s nice. He’s like, eighteen though, so that’s pretty shitty.”

“What’d he do?”

“Drug offences. But really he was just doing it to feed his little sisters.”

“Oh. Ok, the system is messed up.”

“You’re telling me,” Jake sighs.

“Hey!” Amy remembers her other, non-baby related news. “I got you a new attorney. And she seems pretty confident that she can help us.”

“What? Who?” Jake asks, eagerly.

“Don’t hate me.”

“Why would I – oh.”

“Yeah. It’s Sophia,” she confirms what she’s pretty sure he’s already thinking.

“Great.”

“She thinks she can make a great case against Hawkins, Jake,” Amy tells him.

“Ok,” he sighs again. “I mean, she _is_ a great attorney. I just never thought I’d see her again.”

“She was pretty surprised when she saw me in her office, actually.”

“Was she weird about it?”

“A little, at first. But she’s glad we’re happy. She’s pleased to be able to help you.” There’s a beat of silence between them. Amy listens to Jake’s measured breaths.

“Ames?” Jake’s voice grows quieter.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For going to see Sophia, for fighting for Rosa and me. For standing by me. For all of it.” Amy has never wanted to hug another human being more than in this moment.

“I love you,” Amy replies, carefully placing a hand on her stomach. It’s the strangest thing, the knowledge that there is a human growing in there. And that Jake has no idea.

“I love you, too.”

\--

Time picks up the pace after that. Amy visits Jake and Rosa again with Gina and Karen, and Gina breaks and tells Rosa that Amy is pregnant, which results in Rosa smiling for real and telling Amy that she needs to tell Jake. Rosa provides a new angle on the situation, pointing out that it will give him something to look forward to, especially now that Sophia is helping to fight their battle. Everyone agrees that the best thing to do is just t _ell him_ , so Amy starts making more notes on her laptop on what she should say.

She finally manages to tell her parents, four days later, on a Skype call. Her mom cries and asks her how she’s going to manage by herself, and her dad gives her a gruff ‘congratulations’, and asks her if she has everything she needs. Eventually, almost an hour later, Amy has managed to convince them that she’s ok, that yes, she’s sure Jake will be out of there by the time the baby comes, and no, she does not want her mom to move in with her. By the time they hang up, her mom is digging through boxes of Amy’s old baby things to see if she can find anything worthwhile to send to her.

Amy tells Captain Holt, Terry, and Boyle all at once, gathering them in the briefing room and pacing up and down for a few minutes until Gina comes in and loudly asks her if she’s told them about the baby already. She shoots her a death glare but is secretly thankful because now she doesn’t have to actually say the words she can’t seem to find.

“Is this true, Santiago?” Captain Holt asks over Boyle’s excitable shrieking.

“It is,” Amy smiles at him. “And I think… I think it’s going to be a good thing,” she tells him, more confidently than she feels.

“Congratulations!” Terry beams at her, drawing her in for a hug. “Have you told Jake yet?” He asks, his smile slipping.

“No. I don’t know how to,” she tells him, but she’s drowned out by Charles yelling about ‘America’s dream baby’.

“Do you have everything you need?” Captain Holt asks her in the same tone of voice her dad had used on the Skype call, moments later when Terry has taken Charles outside to calm down.

“Yes. I’m ok,” she smiles at him.

“Well, I’m…” he steadies himself, “I’m sure that you, and Peralta, will do a really good job,” he tells her sincerely. The tears are back in her eyes and before she knows it she’s hugging him, too, her face pressed into his blue jacket. He pats her on the back a few times before she steps back and coughs, a little awkwardly.

“Thank you,” she says, nodding at him before turning to leave the briefing room. Her phone buzzes on the way back to her desk and it’s a notification from the baby app she installed that weekend.

It tells her that the baby, eight weeks into growing now, is the size of a kidney bean.

\--

Eight weeks turn to eleven weeks and then the baby is the size of a fig, and Amy’s bump seems to be growing by the day. Gina’s does too, and the summer heat is getting to her – she’s replaced her space heater with two fans and a mini fridge, because she says the one in the break room is too far for her to walk. It scares Amy, seeing Gina like that because she knows that before long, that will be her. The weeks are lost in meetings with Sophia, a particularly difficult string of burglary cases, visits to Jake and Rosa, and the stack of books Amy now owns on how to grow, birth, and then raise a baby. They are nights sobbing into the pillow because _how the hell is she supposed to do this alone_ , but lunches with her mom, or Karen, or Charles. They are the weird cravings – most recently, pita chips dipped in mustard – and the sweet gifts of tiny onesies from Terry and the coupons-and-fruit- basket combo from Captain Holt.

The weeks ticking by also mean that Jake and Rosa have been in prison for over a month now. The guilt in Amy’s chest still flares up every time she laughs, and every time she is reminded that she still hasn’t told Jake. It’s at the top of every single one of her lists, and it’s echoing in her brain every time she goes to visit him or talks with him on the phone. But this isn’t how she imagined it happening. She’s always wanted kids, and before Jake was arrested she was pretty sure she wanted kids with _him_. Not yet, but she has a year marked out on the life plan. Turns out that life just isn’t all that plan-able.

The week is in full swing when life throws in another curveball. It’s Wednesday, and Amy is leaving work for the day, waiting for the elevator and wondering whether she has any time to grab something to eat before her evening meeting with Sophia. Her phone rings as the elevator doors open and she steps in, answering without checking the caller ID.

“Amy?” It’s Sophia on the other end, sounding a little breathless.

“Sophia? I’m just on my way to your office,” Amy tells her.

“Great, hurry! I’ve got some amazing new, Amy,” Sophia’s voice is suddenly crackly as the elevator doors close. Amy pushes the button for the parking garage.

“Sophia? What did you say?” Amy turns the volume of her phone up.

“We got her. Hawkins-“ the connection drops and Amy’s heart is beating out of her chest as she tries to reconnect the call.

She’s getting ahead of herself because she has no idea what Sophia means, but she’s already coming up with six different creative ways of telling Jake he’s going to be a dad, while he stands next to her outside of those walls. Amy’s phone rings again as she steps out of the elevator at the bottom, and she guesses it’s Sophia, slamming the phone to her ear.

“Sophia, what were you saying?” Amy asks hurriedly, standing still so as not to lose the connection again.

“Amy?” It’s not Sophia, it’s Karen.

“Oh, Karen, hi! Can I call you back, Sophia just called me, she’s got some good news,” Amy rushes her words, desperate to find out what’s going on.

“Amy, something happened.” It’s only then that Amy figures out that Karen is crying, her voice thick and laden with tears. Her blood instantly turns to ice, her free hand dropping to the tiny baby bump.

“What?” She swallows, bracing herself against the wall behind her.

“It’s Jake. He’s in the hospital. You need to get down here now.”

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so. This chapter is longer than I intended, and I don't think I have any emotions left in my body anymore because they're all right here in this fic. The reaction to the first chapter was way better than I was expecting, and every single one of your comments made me smile like an idiot, so thank you!!
> 
> I'm 100% sure that the law stuff in this chapter is wrong, but, just embrace it ok.

It’s Charles who finds her, stepping out of the elevator less than a minute later, swinging a brown paper bag filled with the remains of the bagels he had returned to the precinct with at lunch time. He freezes in his tracks when he sees Amy, standing a little to the left of the elevator, leaning against the wall, squeezing her phone so tight that her knuckles have turned white, ragged breaths tearing past her lips.

“Amy!” Charles rushes to her side, the bagels abandoned on the concrete. “Is it the baby? Should we go to the hospital?” He reaches for her as she looks up at him with terrified eyes, and his own eyes flit between her face and the phone in her hand, call still in progress. Amy hands it to him, her head spinning as she tries to take in measured breaths, tries to think straight- past the sound of her own heart beating in her ears. “Hello?” Amy vaguely hears Charles talking into the phone, one of his hands on her shoulder blade, a firm presence reminding her that she is not alone. “Mrs Peralta? It’s Charles, Jake’s best friend, from work… ok…ok,” his words become quieter, and Amy can see the gears whirring in his mind. He ends the call with a “we’re on our way”, and then they move.

None of it seems real as Charles ushers Amy to his car and opens the door for her to climb in. The familiar sickness is swirling in her stomach, but this time she doesn’t think it has anything to do with the baby. It’s the feeling of terror and the dread of not knowing, and they have mixed together and it’s all gone sour. Amy can hear Charles telling her that they’re going to the hospital, reassuring her that everything is going to be ok, but in her mind she’s thinking that s _omething bad went down_ , she’s thinking about the night Jake told her he wished something could happen, romantic stylez (with a z, because of course). She’s wishing that she had kissed him right there and then, in that parking lot, because then she would have had a whole extra year with him. Sitting in the passenger seat on the way to the hospital, it doesn’t matter to Amy than back then, they weren’t ready to be together. They still had pieces of life to pick through before they could be together, before kissing in the evidence room. Before they killed their captain, before Jake’s speech at the funeral, before he got a new mattress for her, they said ‘I love you’ for the first time, moving in together, stolen kisses, before he finds her on a rooftop before the sergeant’s exam (it’s all flashing past her eyes like her life is ending).

All that matters right then is that they could have had one shining, extra year. Because now they might not get another minute. She’s remembering how it felt to fall in love with him, and wondering if it would have felt any different a year earlier.

(Falling in love with Jake was perspective altering. Like when she was tiny and went on a plane for the first time, how the clouds looked fluffy enough to catch her if she fell. It’s her brother Anthony shaking his head and telling her that _clouds aren’t solid, Amy. You’d fall right through._ It’s confirming it in the heavy encyclopaedia she keeps on top of the bookshelf at home, the one she needs all of her strength to pull down and not drop on her toes. The kind of earth-stopping knowledge which is thrown your way all the time as a child, but comes at you as an adult in the form of seeing the guy who sits in the desk across from you in a whole new light. The kind of light that makes you want to kiss him and never stop.)

They arrive at Brooklyn Methodist an indeterminate amount of time later, Charles opening the door for Amy and leading her through the hallways. The world is a blur of shapes and sounds, her mind stuck on a singular image again, but this time it’s Jake telling her he loves her for the first time as she tries not to step on his toes on the cruise ship. What if she never hears those words from him again? What if this baby never gets to hear those words from him at all?

It’s Karen who breaks Amy out of the bubble of her own mind. It’s seeing her sobbing silently into her hands in a waiting area, and then Amy’s legs give out and she’s falling into a chair beside her and she is sure, so damn sure, that he’s gone. She gives up all attempts at breathing as the air leaves her lungs. It’s too hard to breathe by herself.

“Is he gone?” The words scratch at her throat as she says them.

Karen looks up, realising that she isn’t by herself any more, and wordlessly pulls Amy towards her, sobbing into the top of Amy’s head instead of her own hands. The seconds tick by slowly as Amy waits for confirmation, for any sort of sign to confirm what she is certain she already knows – that he is gone. She can’t bring herself to think the words _dead, dying, died,_ sticking with ‘gone’ instead. Gone, so that he might have just run to the bodega down the street.

“He’s in surgery.” It’s Charles who says Amy’s new favourite three words, coming into the room and sitting across from her, and then air is spilling back into her lungs, her head spinning with the lack of it. They don’t operate on people who aren’t there anymore. So somehow, Jake Peralta is still a part of the world.

“How do you know?” Amy asks, her voice still sounding scratchy and unfamiliar.

“Nurse told me,” he gestures at the door where a nurse with a warm smile is walking through the door.

“Mrs Peralta?” The nurse looks down at Amy and Karen, and for a second, Amy thinks that she’s talking to her, assuming they’re married, but then Karen is gently letting her go and standing up, nerves and anticipation crossing her features. “Your son is still in theatre, but the doctors have informed me that he’s doing well.” Amy’s sure they’re routine words, just another task in the nurse’s packed day, but to her, Karen, and Charles, the words are _everything_.

“Is he going to be ok?” Karen asks, her voice muddy with tears.

“It’s still early days, and we don’t know what the long-term effects are going to be. But he’ll live,” the nurse tells them, and Karen steps back into her seat, shoulders shaking with fresh sobs.

For Amy, the earth rights itself again. The clouds can stay in the sky, the world can keep orbiting the sun. The nurse talks them through Jake’s injuries and Amy tries her hardest to tune in. She needs to research the injuries, make a list of questions for the doctors. She hears the key words of ‘pneumothorax’, ‘stab wounds’, ‘lacerations’, ‘blood loss’, and ‘blunt force trauma’.

Later, alone in a hospital bathroom stall, the tears stream down her face and she whispers to the baby that everything is going to be ok.

\--

People trickle into the waiting area for the rest of the day. First it’s Gina, eyes rimmed with red and demanding to know what happened, and if her oldest friend is going to be ok. All they do know is that Jake was attacked, but they don’t know any of the specific details yet. The thought of people attacking him makes Amy want to punch a wall again, but she doesn’t. Instead, she busies herself helping Charles make a run to the hospital cafeteria and carry back two cardboard holders of drinks. When they get back, Karen and Gina are filling Captain Holt and Terry in, and even Hitchcock and Scully are there with a mountain of vending machine snacks. When they all sit down there is a spare seat between Gina and Terry, where Rosa would have fit perfectly.

It’s an hour later that the same nurse – her badge proclaims that her name is Janie - returns and informs them all that Jake is out of surgery and doing well. They’re keeping him in a medically induced coma for now, giving his brain time to recover, but one of them can go and see him now, if they would like. Amy looks over at Karen, who had been talking with Gina before the nurse came in.

“You go, sweetheart,” Karen tells her, giving her a small push towards the door before she can protest.

“And who are you?” Janie asks, pen poised over her clipboard.

Amy isn’t sure how to answer, because this isn’t a normal case of visiting someone you love in a hospital. No matter how close to death he came, and how much she doesn’t want to think about it, Jake is still a prisoner, and she knows that protocol for visiting a prisoner in the hospital dictates that it’s direct family members only. Even if there was a way to measure the amount she loves him, to demonstrate with certainty that she loves him more than she loves anyone else in the whole world, they still couldn’t let her through.

“This is Detective Santiago. She’s Detective Peralta’s wife.” It’s Captain Holt’s voice Amy hears, and he’s standing at her shoulder and speaking with confidence. Amy turns and looks him the eyes, a quiet thank you, before turning back to the nurse who is frowning at her clipboard. Amy’s foot taps anxiously as she waits, sure that the nurse will contest her.

“I don’t see anything in his notes about a wife… and you have different last names,” sure enough, Janie is going to deny Amy entry.

“Different last names? It’s 2017, Janie,” Charles scoffs from his seat behind Amy.

“That… that is true,” Janie concedes, her note flipping become more panicked by the second.

“They’re married alright,” it’s Terry this time, coming to stand beside her. “I officiated their wedding. It was _beautiful_.” He presses his hand to his heart for effect, and despite it all, Amy can feel a smile quirking at her lips.

“You’re going to stop my daughter-in-law from seeing her sick husband?” It’s Karen’s turn now, her voice still shaking a little even as she tries to sound mad.

“And,” Gina adds, “she’s with child.” Gina is standing up now, struggling a little, but striding across to stand in front of Terry either way. “You’re going to anger a _pregnant lady_ by stopping her from seeing her husband?” Gina folds her arms over her bump.

“You are?” Janie asks, looking down at Amy’s barely-there bump.

“Eleven weeks,” Amy confirms.

“Well, congratulations,” Janie tells her, before going back to the notes. There’s an awkward minute of silence whilst Janie rifles. “Where’s your ring, if you’re married?” Janie wonders, sounding more curious than anything.

“She’s pregnant. Her fingers swelled up,” Gina supplies without missing a beat, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“Oh. Yeah. Right,” Janie nods. “Ok, so these notes must be out of date?” She poses it like a question. “So I guess… I guess I can take you through to see your husband.” They all breathe a collective sigh of relief, and then Janie is leaving, and Gina is pressing Amy forwards. She mouths a thank you at them all, gratefulness flooding her body and feeling a little overwhelming, and then she follows Janie through the hallways to a room with a correctional officer positioned outside.

It’s a strange feeling, standing outside of the room, waiting for Janie to call her in. Amy is as scared to see him now as she was the first time she visited him in prison. The most obvious reason is because she doesn’t know what happened to him, or how bad it’s going to be. She’s seen attack victims countless times. She can’t remember each case individually off the top of her head, but some of them stand out. From the 28-year-old gang member, beaten within an inch of his life for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, to the 84-year-old woman who was mugged on her way home from the grocery store, and was able to help them bring in the perp two weeks later, and the 17-year-old girl who was beaten to death by her boyfriend. That case had set off Amy’s first panic attack in years, and Jake had talked her down from it in the back alley behind the crime scene, his hands on her face, his eyes capturing hers, his words calming her down until she could see straight again. It must have been six years ago now, she thinks. He was looking out for her even then.

The secondary reason, less pressing even if it still makes her palms sweat, is that when he wakes up (he _will_ wake up, and he _will_ be ok. Thinking about any sort of alternative opens up at least fifty new reasons to be scared) she has to tell him that he is going to be a father. And then after that, he has to go back to his cell. Unless…

Reason three. The call with Sophia. Amy’s phone has been buried at the bottom of her bag ever since Charles handed it back to her on the way to the hospital. And although the knowledge that Sophia has found something, something which has the potential to be amazing, has been niggling at the back of her mind, there’s only so much she can deal with at once, and right now it’s making sure that Jake is going to be ok. But once that’s done, she has to call Sophia back. She has to hear the news, and maybe it will be bad, or something which is going to take years and years to go through, or any number of other terrible scenarios running through her head. It’s like Schrodinger’s Cat, because until she calls Sophia back, Jake and Rosa are both going to be proven innocent, or they are going to remain imprisoned. She knows it’s more complicated than that, but the fact is that until she speaks to Sophia, ignorance is bliss.

Finally, before she can think up any more fears, Janie steps out of Jake’s room and tells Amy that she can come in.

“It might look scary, but the tubes are there to help him until we wake him up from the coma,” Janie prepares Amy before they go in.

“Ok,” Amy says confidently, and then she is standing in the room, and she’s close enough to touch Jake for longer than she’s been able to in over a month.

But from the doorway, it doesn’t even really look like him. Amy stops, taking in the scene. His face is swollen on one side, eye puffy and bruised, a stitched-up slash on his cheekbone. There’s a tube propping his lips open and disappearing into his throat, and bruises painted over his neck. He has a thin paper hospital gown on and a hospital sheet pulled up to his collarbone, and Amy’s first thought after the initial shock is that _he’ll get cold_. His arms are free of the covers, lying still at his sides, one arm covered in deep scratches and the other surprisingly unharmed – just the blank skin she is used to, marred only by an IV taped into his hand.

She’s angry about the whole thing. The fact that Jake was incarcerated in the first place, the fact that he was alone in there, the fact that someone did _this_ to the love of her entire life. The thing that makes her the angriest, though, is that his wrist is cuffed to the metal railings of the bed, and that there’s a police officer sitting at his bedside, watching Jake like he’s about to stand up and attempt to run.

“Why does he have _that_ on?” She walks over and taps the metal of the handcuff, rounding on the police officer with the fiercest expression she can muster. She _knows_ that it’s protocol. But the thing is, it just doesn’t matter to her right now. All that matters is that Jake gets better, and gets out of prison, and that they can start this whole terrifying parenthood thing together. All she asks is that she is able to tangle her fingers with his and never, ever let go again.

“I’m just doing my job, ma’am,” the officer tells her, his voice measured and calm.

“He’s not going to try anything. But you know that, because _you_ let this happen to him!” She’s whisper shouting, afraid of being too loud and being removed from the room, or somehow waking Jake up before he’s ready.

“Mrs Santiago,” Janie’s hand is on her arm. “You need to calm down.” It doesn’t register that the nurse is speaking to her at first, because it’s her mom who’s called Mrs Santiago, not her. But then she remembers that as far as the nurse knows, she’s married, and if she isn’t careful, she knows she’s going to be thrown out of her ‘husband’s’ room, so she takes a step back and sits in the seat beside the bed, still glaring at the officer.

“For the record, I think he’s innocent,” the officer tells her, as soon as Janie has left the room.

“What?” Amy thinks she’s misheard him.

“I’ve been following the case. Him and that other detective. And I don’t think they did it.”

“Why not? Everyone else does.”

He glances at his feet, bringing a hand up to run it through his hair. Amy takes the opportunity to slide her hand into Jake’s. It’s cold, and he doesn’t squeeze her hand back, but it’s the first time in a long time she has been able to hold his hand. He is an inmate in a hospital bed, unconscious and bruised, but he is still her Jake.

“I don’t think he’s guilty because his story is _my_ story,” the officer explains.

“What do you mean?” Amy asks, tilting her head to one side.

“Because,” he looks at his fingernails now instead of his shoes, “I was raised by a single mom, too. And it was my job to take care of her, and my kid sister. I wanted to be a superhero, I was so good at looking out for them. In the end, I decided to become a cop,” he shrugs, finally looking up at her. He doesn’t look a day over twenty-five. “I know I’m just a beat cop, but I see a lot of bad stuff out there. Just really _bad stuff_. And I wouldn’t do that to my mom, I wouldn’t break her heart like that. So I gotta believe he wouldn’t either. I gotta believe there’s still good people.” Amy watches him, reaching down to swipe at a line of mud on his shoe.

“He is. Good people, I mean,” Amy tells him, swallowing to quash the lump in her throat. “What’s your name?”

“Zeke. And I know you’re not his wife. I’ve read his file. But it’s ok. If I were in his position, I’d want someone to let my girl visit me, too.”

Amy has to swallow really hard to push the lump back down her throat this time. She reaches up to brush Jake’s hair back from his forehead, surprised at how long it has grown in just a month. It’s just another physical reminder of how time is marching on without him. Just like the bump slowly growing beneath her shirt.

She looks down at it now, running a final thumb along Jake’s uninjured cheekbone and then bringing it down to cover the place where the baby grows. She wants to tell him, right now, even though he probably can’t hear her. She can practice saying the words to him over and over again now whilst he can’t hear, so that when he wakes up, when he can hear, she’ll be able to say them perfectly on the first try. She glances at Zeke, wishing that she could be alone with Jake for this, but Zeke is pulling his phone out of his pocket, subtly opening up a messenger app with the phone in his lap. Amy takes her chance, leaning over to kiss the corner of Jake’s lips lightly, and then putting her own lips close to his ear.

“I’m here. And I love you. And you’re gonna be a Papa.”

\--

Amy gets thirty minutes a day with Jake, and so does Karen. Nobody else is allowed into the room, and not even Zeke can get them any more than a precious thirty minutes each. After the first day, sitting at his bedside and listening to the machines beeping, she gets a ride home with Gina and then falls onto the bed, the exhaustion from the day catching up with her. Sleep takes her instantly, before she has had a chance to eat anything or even pull her hair out of its ponytail.

It’s a phone call that wakes her the next morning, and after a second of pure confusion, utter dread makes her fumble around on the ground for the phone, spilling out of her bag, sure that it’s the hospital. Amy says a split second prayer to anyone who might be listening, but the caller ID tells her that it’s Sophia. She breathes a sigh of relief, remembers the phone call with Sophia from the previous day, and answers groggily, not even stopping to check the time.

“Hi, Amy?” Sophia checks quickly.

“Yeah,” Amy’s brain is still clicking into gear as she pushes herself up, sitting against the head of the bed.

“Terry called me yesterday and explained what happened. How’s Jake?” Sophia asks, and Amy can hear street noises in the background. Sophia must be walking somewhere.

“He’s going to be ok,” Amy confirms. “But it’s bad. He’s in a medically induced coma but they aren’t sure how long for yet.”

“Well, he’s a fighter. He’ll pull through,” Sophia says, confidently.

“Yeah. He is.” Amy rubs the sleep out of her eyes with her free hand.

“Does Rosa know? I’m going to need to schedule a visit with her soon anyway, I can talk to her about it,” Sophia offers.

“No,” Amy declines quickly. “One of us should do it.”

“Ok.” The conversation stalls, and nerves knot in Amy’s stomach again as she prepares for what Sophia has to say about the case. She knows it’s coming. “So the news I was going to tell you yesterday. Are you ready to hear it?”

“Is it good news?”

“It is.”

“Ok. I’m ready.” Amy draws her knees in and pulls one of Jake’s t-shirts towards her. There are several of them dotted around the apartment now, because sometimes she finds herself pulling them on, closing her eyes and breathing them in.

Amy squeezes her eyes shut as she listens, her hair falling out of yesterday’s ponytail and around her face, hope blossoming in her chest. It’s a long shot, and maybe it will lead to nothing, simply pulling them back to square one. It needs work too, before they can even think about trying to set a new trial date, and everyone is going to have to chip in to make it work. But maybe, just _maybe_ , the stars will finally align, and something will work out for them. When they finish the call and hang up, Amy scrunches a fistful of the t-shirt material up in her hand, eyes still scrunched shut.

“We’re bringing you home, Pineapples.”

\--

It takes four days for them to bring Jake out of the coma. It’s awful, watching him like that, and despite the doctors assuring Amy that this is perfectly normal, that they will wake him up when he’s ready, she is still filled with doubt that he ever will. The swelling on his face goes down significantly, the bruising turning to a yellowish colour, and in the thirty-minute window she gets with him every day, she watches him slowly beginning to look like himself again. She tells him about the baby every visit, sometimes twice, whispering the words as the baby grows to the size of a lime, and the date of the appointment when she will get to s _ee_ it on screen draws closer. She is using all of her strength to will Jake awake before then, because even though he won’t be able to go with her, she wants him to know beforehand, and she wants to be able tell him all about if afterwards and bring him a copy of the scan picture.

Amy also wants Jake to be able to squeeze her hand back before, because what if something’s wrong? She’s been keeping her appointments and taking her vitamins and feeling her skin stretch week-by-week as the baby grows bigger. She starts to refer to the baby in her mind as ‘he’, because calling something she already loves this much an ‘it’ doesn’t feel right. And she isn’t sure when she starts to love him, but suddenly the baby app is telling her that he’s starting to develop reflexes. When she reads about it under the covers at night, she swears her heart doubles in size to accommodate the rush of love. After that she isn’t sure what it felt like _not_ to love him. She whispers it to Jake the next day and knows that, if he were awake, he’d make a comment about her being the Grinch.

And then, just as quickly as he was taken away from her, into the induced coma, they bring him back. It’s nine p.m. when Amy gets the call, and she is mid-way through her third sundae of the night (she’s taking Boyle’s advice from the plane back from Texas, all those long months ago), wearing one of Jake’s old t-shirts and some peach yoga pants she had forgotten she owned, and then Karen’s calling her and it can only mean one of two things. Either Jake has deteriorated, or he’s woken up. Amy swallows her ice cream as quickly as she can, feeling it burn her throat with cold, and then answers the phone to the two greatest words in the world.

“He’s awake.”

Her feet are carrying her out of the door, snatching up her keys, before she can process the information properly. There is still half a sundae on her kitchen counter and it’s going to be melted puddle of stickiness when she gets back, but all she knows is that she has to get to Brooklyn Methodist as quickly as she possibly can. She doesn’t want him to think that he’s on his own, that she’s left him, that it’s all become too much for her. Because the truth is, as long as there is still air in her lungs, she’s going to keep loving him, and keep fighting for him, and keep standing at his side (even if, at the minute, that’s mostly metaphorical), and she needs to tell him that, to tell him _everything_ right now.

The world shrinks back to background noise again as she navigates her way to the hospital. It’s a blur of traffic lights and rain drops and sirens and joggers, and then parking her car on autopilot, rain cascading down her cheeks, her shoes squelching on the linoleum floor, sirens and nurses and the smell of disinfectant. Then it’s the door with the officer outside.

For a second, Amy thinks that he’s going to stop her, tell her she has already had her thirty minutes for the day, but he pointedly looks the other way when she rounds the corner towards the room, so she steps into the room without hesitation. For once, she knows exactly what she has to do.

Jake is propped up on a pile of pillows, still in the thin hospital gown, skin still peppered with bruises and now a slightly greyish hue. Karen is sitting to one side of him, holding the hand cuffed to the side of the bed, and Zeke, back on duty for the first time in two days, is standing by the window, looking out to try to give them as much privacy as possible without leaving the room.

But none of that matters to Amy in that moment, because Jake’s eyes are open, and they light up as soon as he sees her. It’s three long strides to the side of his bed, each of them taking too long, and one deep breath in, and then her arms are around him and he is solid and real and his free arm is stretched around her back. She’s dripping rain on him and then it is joined by her tears, warm on her cold skin. He smells like disinfectant instead of prison, and it’s still unfamiliar but it’s better by a mile. He’s pulling her closer, burying his face in the crook of her neck. Just for a second, Amy swears that time stands still, or rather, they exist in a bubble outside of its constraints. It’s just his hand pressing against her back, and her arms holding him like she will lose him forever if she lets go.

“You came.” His voice is scratchy through lack of use, but still beautiful.

“Why would I be anywhere else?” She’s whispering to him again but this time he can hear her. This time he can let her go a little to smile up at her, to tell her he loves her. She kisses him gently, careful not to hurt him, closing her eyes.

“How long have you been awake?” She asks him, seconds later, pulling back a little. Their fingers tangle together automatically, magnetised.

“Uh, I don’t…” he looks at the clock on the wall behind Amy.

“About an hour,” Karen supplies.

“When did they call you?” Amy asks her, the cold of the rain finally hitting her.

“Not soon enough,” Karen says, as Amy starts to shiver a little. “Amy, you’re freezing. Is it still raining out?”

“Yeah. Real bad,” Amy nods, looking back at Jake who is watching her like she hung the moon. “How are you feeling?” She pushes his hair away from his forehead again, stretching down to kiss his warm skin.

“Like I got hit by a bus. But don’t tell Gina I said that. It’s probably disrespectful,” he says, a half-smile gracing his features.

“I think she’d forgive you. What happened to you?” She asks, bracing herself for the worst.

Jake shrugs. “Some guys were coming at Milo – remember my new cellmate I told you about? They wanted to get back at him for something his older brother did on the outside, and he’s just a kid. I wasn’t about to let that happen. And I thought I recognised one of those guys. Turns out I put him away for attempted murder last year. So this happened,” he finishes with a grimace.

“I’m so sorry,” Amy tells him, squeezing his hand tighter and trying to push away the physical pain in her chest at hearing he had been hurt trying to help someone else.

“Always the protector,” Karen smiles at Jake fondly.

“I’m just hoping Milo’s ok.”

“I could call and check tomorrow?” Amy offers.

“Yeah. That would be great. Thanks, babe,” he smiles at her again. She never wants him to stop.

“Amy, honey, take my jacket,” Karen pulls her soft black jacket from the back of her chair and passes it across the bed to Amy, who is starting to feel the cold settle into her bones.

“It’s ok,” Amy insists.

“No, take it. You’re freezing and it’s not good for the-” she stops suddenly, eyes widening, arm stalling in mid-air, holding the jacket. Amy knows what she was about to say. Jake doesn’t. Amy stalls too, her eyes a mirror image of Karen’s.

“Not good for the what?” Jake asks, looking between his mom and his girlfriend.

“Uh… Jake. I have something to tell you,” Amy says, after a few seconds of silence. Karen shakes the jacket at her and Amy lets go of Jake just long enough to pull it on, before gripping his un-cuffed hand between both of hers.

“What? What’s going on?” He asks, sitting up a little straighter, worry edging into his voice.

“Well. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while. But I didn’t want you to worry about me. Or get mad at yourself for not being there. Or… anything else.” She’s practiced enough, and five minutes ago she couldn’t wait to tell him. It’s just that when she does, everything is going to change again. The baby feels much more real now, now that she can feel him growing and he’s the size of the limes she always sees stacked up neatly in the grocery store (the last time she passed them she picked up two and weighed them in her hands, running her thumbs across their pitted skin). But when she tells Jake it’s all going to be really, really, really r _eal_. And she can finally start to prepare things without a landslide of guilt on her shoulders.

“Amy? Are you… are you sick? Did something happen?” Jake’s concern is growing as he lets go of her hands and reaches up to cup the left side of her face.

“No! I’m not sick. I’m…” she takes one final deep breath. “You’re gonna be a dad, Jake.” There is silence again, this time taken up by Jake staring at her, open mouthed, and Karen on the edge of her seat.

“What?” Jake narrows his eyes as if he didn’t quite catch what she had said.

“I’m pregnant. We are… we’re gonna have a baby. You’re gonna be a dad.” The tears, which had stopped, are back again, welling up in her brown eyes and blurring her vision.

“Are you serious?” Jake asks softly. Amy nods at him vigorously. “Oh my God.” He immediately pulls her close again, trying to use both arms but getting stopped by the cuff. He wraps an arm around her waist and peppers kisses down her neck and across her shoulder. “Since when?” There are tears in his eyes, too, and his voice has gone strange and high in pitch.

“She’s twelve weeks,” Karen supplies, smiling so wide that her eyes crinkle at the edges.

“Mom? How long have _you_ known?” Jake asks, and he’s laughing. Amy wraps an arm around his shoulders.

“A few weeks. She kept puking when we would come to visit you,” Karen laughs, too.

Jake looks up at Amy again, like he’s never seen anything to beautiful before on the whole planet. Like she’s the sun, and he’s been living in the dark.

“You’re gonna have a _baby_?” He can’t believe it. His eyes shoot to her stomach suddenly, and Amy uses her free hand to press the t-shirt she’s wearing taught against her abdomen, revealing the small bump. He makes a sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and pulls his hand from around her waist to place it on the bump, so carefully. He spreads his fingers out over the soft fabric.

“He’s the size of a _lime_ right now,” Amy says, looking down at his hand, covering the place where their baby grows.

“A lime? Wow,” Jake shakes his head in disbelief. “Wait, he?” His eyes move back to her face.

“I mean, I don’t know yet,” she says quickly. “I just didn’t want to keep calling him an ‘it’.”

“Is he doing ok? Is he growing properly? Are _you_ ok?” Jake fires off questions rapidly.

“Yeah. We’re both ok. And he’s growing perfectly. He’s perfect,” Amy assures him, squeezing his shoulders tightly.

“How long have you known? Did you know before the trial?” He asks her.

“No. It really hasn’t been that long. I just… I didn’t know how to tell you,” Amy admits.

“It’s ok. I’m just sorry I can’t be there for you. Really be there,” he says, in a voice tinged with sadness. It’s then that Amy remembers the other news she has to tell Jake. The news from Sophia, who is currently spending time with her small team, cementing the evidence they have before they can submit it with hopes of a new trial.

She sits down in the seat usually reserved for Zeke, who is still standing by the window, takes his hand in hers again, and tells him all about it.

\--

Jake is released back into the care of the prison one week later. During that week Amy has been to visit Rosa and let her know about Jake (but also about Sophia’s new set of evidence), bought a tiny pair of baby sneakers which look uncannily similar to an adult-sized pair Jake owns, and solved a car-jacking case with Charles. She has also stopped throwing up, but she hasn’t stopped carrying the tin of mints in her purse yet. On the day he is transferred back to the prison, Amy heads to her sonogram appointment. Her mom, Karen, Charles, and Gina all offer to go with her, but she declines. Just like with the first appointment, going with anyone but Jake would feel wrong. It’s a chilly morning but she’s stuck in yoga pants again because her pants have stopped co-operating, and she has resigned herself to the fact that she needs to go shopping for maternity clothes already.

The technician is an older lady who asks her sympathetically if the baby’s father will be joining them, and shoots her a look of pity when Amy tells her no, she will be doing this alone. All of the material she’s read tells her that there will be another sonogram appointment in six to ten weeks, and she’s fiercely hopeful that either Jake will be present then, or closer to coming home at the very least.

The scan is over all too quickly. There is cool gel on her stomach, and then the technician is turning the screen around and there, grainy and grey, is the baby. It takes her breath away. It doesn’t look too baby shaped yet, as expected, but the technician points out his feet and hands, his round belly, the slope of his nose, the jut of his chin. He’s there, and he’s r _eally, really, really real._ He’s wiggling around in there, too, not still as Amy had been picturing him.

“He’s saying hi to you, mama,” the technician jokes as the baby moves his hands around. Amy stares at the screen in awe, unable to peel her eyes away.

The technician carries out all the checks and measurements she needs to, informing Amy of what she’s doing every step of the way, and confirming that he is developing well.

Amy leaves the appointment with a set of pictures, which she takes a photo of with her phone as soon as she climbs back into her car. She sends the photo to her mom, to Karen, and to the squad text chain, and then drives home with the window down and a smile on her face. When she gets back, she pulls the scissors from the top drawer in the kitchen and cuts the strip of pictures into individual ones, sticking one to the fridge with a magnet, slipping one into her wallet, and one goes into an envelope with a handwritten note. She writes out the complicated address on the front, seals it up, and walks to the mailbox to send it to Jake. It will get there before she sees him again, and she hopes it pushes him to carry on, gives him some crumbs of hope. Because they _made_ this baby together, and in a matter of months he’s going to be out in the world, and he’s going to be beautiful.

Once upon a time, Amy had called her first-grade macaroni art the best thing she had ever made, and then later it had changed to her science fair entry, and then the ninth-grade art project which had earned her the best grade in the class. Now she knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that this baby, now peach-sized, will be the best thing she has made to date. And it’s going to be difficult to ever create anything better.

\--

The trouble with the legal system, Amy knows, is that everything takes _so long._ It’s another week before Sophia and her team are submitting the new evidence and hoping for a new trial. They’ve been working with Amy and rest of the squad to find what they needed, and it’s been an exhausting week of combing through various documents and clips of security footage.

Once all the new evidence is submitted, the squad plus Sharon head to Shaw’s to celebrate pre-emptively. Captain Holt buys a bottle of champagne for the table, and Sharon spends the night ordering increasingly complicated virgin cocktails for Gina and Amy, swearing that they got her through both of her own pregnancies. She also helps Amy bookmark the best baby furniture on her phone, and recommends three different strollers for Amy to choose from. Gina impulse buys a pack of unicorn wall decals for her baby’s room, which she had painted a few weeks previously with Milton, and mid-way through the night Terry stands on the pool table and starts to sing an Eric Clapton song to Sharon with tears in his eyes. It takes three of them to pull him down, and Gina livestreams the whole thing, which someone in Minnesota watches and then proceeds to order a pizza to the bar for them as a thank you for ‘making their whole week.’

“How are you doing?” Sharon asks her, once Terry is safely down from the pool table and is selecting songs on the jukebox with Charles.

“I’m getting through. I know Jake’s coming home soon,” Amy tells her, leaning back in her seat. She never would have thought that growing a person could be so _tiring_.

“Is your back hurting?” Sharon asks, picking up her wine glass to take another sip.

“A little,” Amy nods, thinking of the restless nights trying to find a comfortable position. Usually, seconds after she did, she realised that she had to pee again.

“Mine was a _wful_ with the twins,” Sharon scrunches up her face with the memory.

“One baby is hard enough,” Amy grimaces at the thought of carrying two of them. “How’d you get through it?”

“One of those rubber ring things,” Sharon makes a circular motion with her hand, “meant I could lay on my front. Also, I made Terry rub my feet,” she laughs.

Just then, the pizza arrives, ordered to a New York pizza joint all the way from Minnesota. They take a slice each and then everyone slowly peels away, until it’s just Amy sitting at the booth, drinking the last of her pink virgin cocktail through a glittery straw.

At this point in the night, back in the _before_ , Jake would have thrown at arm around her shoulder and pulled her in close, kissing her cheek and mumbling something dumb at her, something that would make her smile. And then one of them, the sober one, would drive home, or else they’d get a cab, and then they’d stumble into their apartment (sometimes giggling like teenagers. Sometimes quietly. But either way, it would be together) and Amy would scrub the makeup from her face whilst Jake did any of the remaining dishes. They’d brush their teeth with the backs of their free hands centimetres apart, and end the night the way, in Amy’s opinion, all of the best nights end. Their fingers intertwined, falling asleep to the rhythm of one another’s breaths.

Sitting in the bar as closing time draws nearer and people mill around her, each one the hero of their own story, Amy has never wanted anything more than for the night to end like that. They’re never going to be millionaires, never going to have their faces splashed on the covers of magazines, never going to cure cancer or be the first people to step onto an alien planet. Amy isn’t asking for anything extraordinary. She’s just asking for one warm hand in hers. For one ordinary, messy, beautiful life amongst billions.

\--

Another two weeks tick past. Amy reads an article about a woman whose husband was deployed overseas with the army for eight out of the nine months of her pregnancy, and how she had photographed everything and placed it into a scrapbook to give to her husband when he got back. Because he couldn’t be there for everything, not really, but in this way, he wasn’t totally missing out either. She’s hopeful that Jake won’t miss too many more weeks, but decides that another project is going to be great at distracting her anyway. She buys a marbled blue notebook, two packs of pens, three packs of assorted ribbons and tapes, and a sheet of fruit and vegetable stickers.

She’s going to go week by week, starting with week fifteen, and a red apple sticker to signify the baby’s size. She goes shopping for maternity clothes with Sharon and Gina, and then afterwards goes back to Gina’s apartment to help her stick the unicorn wall decals up. Gina only has a few more weeks to go, and Amy takes pictures of everything, because she knows that Jake would have wanted to be here for this, too. She buys some special paper on the way home and prints the best pictures out on the high GSM glossy paper, and spends the evening carefully sticking them into the book and annotating each one.

During her sixteenth week of pregnancy, Captain Holt and Kevin invite everyone over to their place and announce that they’ve decided to finally hold the wedding they had been talking about for far too long. Captain Holt catches her eye when he adds that they haven’t set a date yet, because they wouldn’t renew their vows without the w _hole_ squad there, Jake and Rosa included, but they have been looking at venues and photographers and balloon suppliers. They pull Amy aside after they make the announcement and ask her to help them plan it, if she wants to. She smiles so widely that it hurts her cheeks and tells them that it would be an honour.

Finally, _finally_ , they get news about the appeal. Sophia comes into the precinct with one of her law students and tells them that there’s going to be a new trial, one month from now. It’s good news, she says, because the judge has looked at their evidence and believes that there’s something there, something worth hearing fully in court. Amy cries, Charles cries, Gina proclaims in a panicked voice that her baby is coming, but ten minutes later it turns out to just be a false alarm.

Amy, Karen, and Gina visit Jake and Rosa together the next day with smiles on their faces to give them the news, and the countdown to the trial begins.

\--

Sixteen weeks begins with an avocado sticker in the scrapbook and Amy frowning at her reflection. Her face is starting to get a little puffy around the edges and she keeps knocking things off of the dresser in their bedroom with the rapidly expanding bump. She is also given the date of the second sonogram, which will be in the week before the trial. So still no Jake.  She almost holds off telling him, not wanting him to be disappointed, but decides against it when he calls her later on that evening. She’ll take pictures of it for the scrapbook, anyway.

“Hey babe,” Jake’s voice greets her as soon as she pushes the button on her phone to accept the call from an inmate.

“Hey,” she smiles into the phone. It’s always good to hear his voice.

“You ok?”

“Long day,” Amy sighs.

“Is the…” he pauses, “avocado ok?” Jake asks, concern in his voice.

“The avocado is fine.” She laughs a little, “how did you know he’s the size of an avocado?”

“Turns out they have baby books in the library here. Who knew.”

“Did you learn anything new?” She asks.

“Yeah! Did you know he’s growing toenails? _Toenails_ , Ames. And his nervous system should be doing great by now. Have you felt him kicking yet?” Amy smiles at the excitement in his voice.

“Not yet,” she replies.

“Maybe he’s waiting for me.”

“He won’t have to wait much longer. But hey, I have something to tell you,” she hates to break up his excitement.

“Oh no. Are we actually having twins? Triplets?”

“What? No, babe. Just one,” she confirms. “But I have another sonogram in a couple weeks. They told me the date today. It’s before your trial, though.”

“Oh. Well that’s ok. You’ll get copies of the pictures to keep again, right?”

“Yeah. And we can find out if he really is a _he_.”

“Should we make it interesting?” He asks, sounding like the same old Jake.

“You want to _bet_ on our child?” Amy raises her eyebrows, pretending to be mad at him.

“I mean, we don’t have to, if you think it’s-“

“I’m kidding,” Amy laughs. “What did you have in mind?”

“You think it’s a boy, right?”

“Yeah. I just have a feeling,” she shrugs. “Don’t you?”

“I’m gonna say girl, Ames.”

“Ok. And what are we betting?”

“Winner picks the name,” he says with confidence.

“What! We’re betting on that? Our kid’s going to live with those consequences for the rest of his, or her, life!”

“Fine. If you’re too scared you’re gonna lose,” he teases her.

“Ok, fine,” she gives in. “But we need a third party to approve the names. In case _one of us_ picks something terrible.”

“Self burn.”

“I was trying to be nice. But if you’re gonna be like that, I was talking about you. And you know it.”

“Ok, babe. You just keep doing a great job of cooking our d _aughter_ , and we’ll find out soon enough. And we can get my mom to be the third party,” Jake says, the smile evident in his voice. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

\--

The next thing to happen, in the interim - the long, agonising, stretch of _waiting_ – is that Gina finally goes into labour. It gets to the stage where she’s so pregnant that she refuses to dance, which makes everyone worry until she throws a family sized pack of Doritos at Charles when he won’t stop fussing over her, concerned over what he’s started to call his ‘cousniece’ (Gina won’t tell anyone whether it’s a boy or a girl, but Charles insists that the shape of her bump means it’s definitely a girl, because that’s how all of the Boyle baby girls are carried).

It happens at almost exactly the mid-point between getting the new trial date, and the new trial actually happening, the week when Gina officially starts her maternity leave. It’s a cloudy Friday, and Amy is finishing up some paperwork, half of her mind on the messy desk across from her, thinking that she needs to clean the thin layer of dust off of it before Jake gets back. Charles and Terry have been at a meeting at One Police Plaza all afternoon, and return to brief Captain Holt before their shifts end and they all head home for the day, and Amy’s eyes flicker up as Charles digs in his bag for his cell phone.

“Code boysenberry,” she hears him saying under his breath as he walks past her desk, staring at the phone screen.

“Huh?” She isn’t sure if he’s talking to her or not. He spins round to face her.

“Gina texted me a couple hours ago but my phone was off. Code boysenberry,” he squints, trying to remember the coding system. “That either means…” his lips move silently. “It either means that she made out with Ryan Gosling, or… or she’s in labour!” His face takes on a look of panic. “Does anyone know where Ryan Gosling is right now?” He asks, looking around the precinct for answers.

“He’s shooting a movie in Berlin,” Terry says casually as he walks past.

“How would you know that?” Amy asks, surprised.

“What? Terry respects Ryan Gosling as an artist,” he shrugs, a little defensive.

“Wait, wait, wait. Charles. If it’s not the Ryan Gosling thing, does that mean she went into labour?” Amy asks, sitting up straighter, suddenly grasping the magnitude of the situation.

“Oh my God,” Boyle realises too. “Code boysenberry! Code boysenberry, people!” He’s yelling now, frantically rushing to his desk to tear one of the drawers open and pull out a green gift bag.

“Did someone say code _boysenberry_?” It’s Captain Holt, stepping out of his office and marching over to Amy.

“Apparently so,” she responds, standing up and tugging on her jacket.

“Well then what are we waiting for? To the hospital!” He claps his hands together and points to the elevators, ushering Amy and Charles away.

“How do you know what-” Amy goes to ask Captain Holt how he’s memorised all of Gina’s colour codes, but decides against it, filing it away in her mind as one of life’s little mysteries.

That’s how, once again, the squad find themselves sitting in a hospital waiting area. But this time, instead of fear and tension and tears, it’s a warm atmosphere, and speculating about what the hell Gina Linetti is going to name her baby. Charles has his green gift bag and six purple balloons, Captain Holt brings a box containing a mobile of stars and planets to hang over the crib, Terry has a tiny, soft wolf onesie and a bouquet of flowers, and Scully and Hitchcock show up with a stuffed polar bear with a blue ribbon on its head. Amy has left her gifts at home, but doesn’t want to show up empty handed. She goes to the hospital gift store, humming happily as she browses through the stuffed animals and the assorted hair bows and the crocheted blankets. She settles on a simple card, a pack of plain grey onesies (for the practicality), and a tub filled with multicoloured rubber duckies for when the baby gets a little older (because they’re adorable).

It’s another five hours before the baby is born, but they all stick it out in the waiting area, talking and remembering, and wishing that Rosa and Jake were there too. Amy can’t help but keep thinking of the day, around five months away, when it will be her in the hospital room, and all of this will be over, this surreal experience of growing an actual person. He will be here, out in the world, and he will learn about sunshine and math and sea creatures how it feels to be loved.

“Do you have a name picked out yet?” Captain Holt asks, sitting across from her, Kevin on one side and Lynn Boyle on the other.

“Not yet,” Amy says. She’s been thinking of some, throwing them around in her head late at night, but none of them are the right ones. Maybe Jake will win the bet, and then it won’t be her problem anyway. Either way, they have time to decide, once he’s out of prison. After that, they will have months and months to think about it. To do anything they want, really. “But if you have any suggestions?” Kevin shakes his head at her.

“It took him three weeks to decide on a name for Cheddar,” he tells Amy, leaning forward in his seat. “By the end of week one, I was ready to agree to anything.”

“It’s a lot of weight to place on his shoulders!” Captain Holt defends himself.

“He’s a dog, Raymond,” Kevin points out.

“I didn’t want to be yelling _Aristotle_ across the park.”

“Because yelling _Cheddar_ is so much better?” Both men turn to look at each other, narrowing their eyes for a few seconds before they both start laughing.

“What just happened?” Amy whispers to Terry, on her left, who has an equally blank expression on his face.

At that moment, the doors leading to the delivery suite open, and Darlene Linetti steps out in the silver dress she had been wearing when she and Lynn had arrived at the hospital, hours earlier. Her bright smile is outlined with red lipstick, and her steps are slow and careful. In her arms, she’s carrying a bundle in a white hospital blanket.

“Everyone. Meet my granddaughter,” she announces, coming to a stop at the edge of the waiting area.

The squad all stand up, rushing to get a first glimpse of the Boyle-Linetti baby. Terry gets to Darlene first, followed by Amy, who looks at the tiny bundle over Darlene’s shoulder. The baby has bright pink cheeks, pouting lips, scrunched up eyes and a few blonde curls. She’s tinier than Amy remembers babies being, but it’s been a couple years since her youngest nephew was born, and he had been six days late and a sturdy nine pounds.

“What’s her name?” Charles asks, reaching up to touch the baby’s cheek. Genevieve is standing on one side of him, beaming, one hand on Nikolaj’s shoulder as he stands on his tiptoes to see his new cousin.

“Indigo Enigma Boyle-Linetti,” Darlene tells them all, to sounds of general agreement. Amy had seen Gina’s baby name list on the day they found out she was pregnant, and by those standards, Indigo is the most normal name in the world. And somehow, it’s perfect for this baby girl.

Amy visits Gina late the next morning, bringing the gifts from home. Milton is asleep in the chair in the corner of the room, Indigo curled up against his chest, and Gina is a little high from all of the pain medication they have her on.

“Don’t do it, Ames,” Gina tells her, voice a little slurred.

“Don’t do what?” Amy can’t help but smile.

“Don’t have a baby. It _really hurts_ ,” Gina stage whispers.

“I kinda guessed that,” Amy assures her. “Don’t you think it’s worth it, though? She’s really something,” Amy nods in the direction of Milton and Indigo.

Gina turns to look at them, her eyes drifting out of focus for a minute.

“Yeah. But we all knew she would be,” Gina says.

It hits Amy then, watching Gina grinning hazily at her daughter. It hits her that Gina Linetti, who once proclaimed sadly that her spirit animal was the naked mole rat, who got kicked out of her dance troupe, who offered to teach Amy how to kiss, is a _mom_. Amy has a moment of panic on behalf of her friend, wondering if she can do this, but then she remembers the picture Jake has of Gina painting his fingernails when they were eleven, and how she had helped him out with his apartment problem, and how she had taken care of six-drink-Amy. Sure, maybe she’ll be unconventional about motherhood, but actually, Amy thinks, she’s going to be damned good at it.

“Why did you pick the name Indigo?” Amy asks her, half curious and half wondering how the hell to go about choosing a baby name (should she win the bet, of course).

“Beyonce named her kid Blue. So I thought about the next colour of the rainbow. And I knew it was the one,” Gina’s words are barely discernible now as the medication takes over. Amy grins, leaves her gifts on the corner unit, and hopes that the next time she’s hanging around in a hospital, it’s to have her own baby.

\--

And then, everyone goes back to just waiting for the time to pass. Amy has put the trial date into the countdown app on her phone, right next to the baby app, and it shows her exactly how many weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds there are to go. Sometimes she leaves it open just to watch the seconds fall away. The days dissolve into paper work and minimal field work (she’s getting too pregnant to do much field work now, which she is still a little bitter about), the snapchats Gina sends of Indigo, and evenings helping Captain Holt and Kevin to plan for their second wedding (they insist she comes over most evenings, and she suspects they’re trying to keep her distracted. Neither party says it officially, but Amy knows, and is eternally grateful).

The second sonogram is every bit as amazing as the first one. She goes alone, again, and the heartbeat sounds like galloping horses. It’s a different technician this time, a short southern woman with rosy cheeks. She doesn’t ask too many questions, and tells Amy enthusiastically that everything is as it should be.

“So did you wanna know the gender?” She asks, when all of the measurements and other checks have been done.

“You can tell?” The books say that you should be able to, at this point, but Amy knows that every baby is different.

“Should be able to. Do you want me to tell you?”

“Uh…” Amy wants to know, like, really badly. But she also knows that Jake wants to know really badly, and he can’t be here to find out. “Could you maybe write it on a piece of paper?”

“Doing one of those gender cakes are you?” The technician asks, picking up her notepad from the shelf behind her.

“Uh. Sure.” Amy doesn’t have the energy to explain everything. None of it’s going to matter soon, anyway.

The technician writes it down, slips it into an envelope, and Amy takes it home in her purse. She’s keeping it in there so that, after the trial, they can open it whenever they want to.

\--

And then the waiting is over, and it’s five in the morning and Amy has been trying to find a comfortable position for two hours. Amy is nineteen-and-a-half weeks, the baby is the size of a mango, and one of his feet always seems to be pressing on her bladder. It’s five a.m. when she gives up on sleep altogether, wishing she could have some coffee to get her through the day. She dresses in one of the simple, dark coloured maternity dresses she had bought on the shopping trip with Sharon and Gina, and takes her time on her hair and makeup.

A strange thing which has only begun in the last few days is that Amy is beginning to feel the baby moving. At first, she disregards it, but after two days of the fluttery feeling from underneath her skin, she Googles it on her break, and a baby website confirms that it is, indeed, the baby moving around. She gasps in shock when she reads that, and Charles instantly rushes over, assuming something is wrong. She shakes her head and shows him the article, pressing her hand to her bump as soon as the fluttering starts up again to see if she can feel it from the outside. She can’t yet, but she rubs soothing circles with her thumb to let him know that she feels him. Later, she takes a picture and places it under the mango sticker in the scrapbook.

She can feel him as she brushes her hair out and picks the perfect shade of lipstick. It’s still an unfamiliar feeling, taking her by surprise a little each time, but it’s also a reminder than she isn’t really alone, no matter how much she may feel like she is. And a reminder that he is doing ok in there.

Amy eats a bagel for breakfast, brushes her teeth, and then does the last of the tidying up of the apartment. She’s spent the past two days doing little pieces of cleaning, trying to make it the best it can be for when Jake gets home. Because that’s what’s going to happen. If she stops to consider the alternative, she has to stand aside and grab onto the wall for support. This is their very last shot. She’ll either be bringing Jake home after the trial, free, ready to start a brand new chapter of their lives together, or she’ll bring him home in fifteen years, to a stack of retained school reports and a kid he barely knows.

It’s too much to think about, so she washes up from breakfast and puts fresh sheets on their bed, throwing the old ones in the laundry and cracking open a new bottle of detergent. She’s already washed, dried, and folded a bunch of his clothes, ready for when he gets back. (She’s also kept a separate pile of them unwashed, telling herself that they wouldn’t all fit in the machine at once, but honestly it’s because they still smell like him. If things go badly, she’s going to need them.)

The trial is due to start at nine-thirty, but she shows up an hour early with coffee for everyone, pacing up and down in the lobby and whiling away the final minutes and seconds until the thing begins. It’s Karen who shows up next, circles beneath her eyes, looking around for a familiar face.

“Karen!” Amy calls over to her, pulling a coffee out of the cardboard tray to offer her.

“Thanks,” Karen takes it, “how long have you been here?”

“Only fifteen minutes. I couldn’t stay home any longer,” she tells Karen.

“Did you get _any_ sleep?” Karen asks, taking a sip of the coffee.

“Not really,” Amy admits. “He likes to sleep on top of my bladder,” she pokes at her stomach with her index finger. “And then I was just thinking about everything.”

“Yeah. I was, too,” Karen says. “And sorry to hear about the bladder sleeping. Jake used to kick me in the back, all the time. I’d wake up six times a night,” she smiles at the memory. “It was worth it though. And this one will be too.”

\--

They only get a two minute glimpse at Jake and Rosa as they enter the courtroom, followed by Sophia, and then they are filing in to take their seats and court is in session.

The first piece of new evidence presented in the trial is a paper trail from the money placed into the offshore account. The whole thing hinges on a man named Ned Stevenson, whose account the $26 million originally came out of, before being dropped into the other accounts and then finally into the offshore accounts in Jake and Rosa’s names. At first, it seemed like the money had been stolen from Ned Stevenson, on account of him seemingly having no connection to any of the current suspects, and being a very rich man, but no police report had been filed, and the bank hadn’t been made aware of anything. Sophia had done some more digging, made a few calls, and then two days later a man with a drivers license proclaiming him to be none other than Ned Stevenson had turned up dead in New Jersey. The kicker was that his prints were on file under a whole different name from an arrest sixteen years ago, and that combined with a familial DNA match showed him to be the older brother of one Lieutenant Melanie Hawkins.

The second piece of evidence is some grainy security footage from a parking garage, two blocks away from the second Golden Gate Gang robbery and three hours after it had taken place, showing Hawkins and the two guys caught with Jake and Rosa. They’re shaking hands, and she hands them a bag. One of the guys opens it, and when zoomed in, it’s obvious that it’s a bag of the masks Jake and Rosa wore when they were arrested.   

\--

Amy sits behind Jake for the second trial, just like she had for the first, and in a lot of ways it feels like nothing has changed. There is still the strange combination of hopelessness and desperation, mixed with the occasional surge of hope. It’s still hard to breathe whenever a new speaker takes the stand and Amy is sure that this is the person who is going to send them to jail. There are countless ways, however, that things _have_ changed. First and foremost, their evidence is different, and unexpected, and hopefully it is stronger. The reactions in the courtroom to both lines of defence are ones of shock. Gina is home with Indigo, but they don’t need her to tell them that.

There is also the fact that Jake and Rosa have been to prison now. That the bad thing happened, and that they’ve both survived this far. Amy can see Jake’s restless, nervous fidgeting, and Rosa nudging him to stay still. It’s been months since they’ve seen each other, she knows, and they must have a lot they want to say, but can’t right now. Rosa has a scar where the cut on her head was the first week Amy went to see her, and Jake’s stab wounds are still raw, still make it difficult to walk the same way he used to. They’ve suffered enough.

Another change is the bump she rests her hands atop. Her hands alternate between resting there, and tangling in her own hair nervously. This change is a terrifying one, because it means that the verdict of the trial doesn’t just have an impact on her, Jake, and Rosa, but on this kid’s whole, entire life.

The trial lasts two days. By the end of the first day it’s looking like they are going to lose, and Jake and Rosa are taken away before anyone is able to say goodbye to them. The squad, Kevin, Karen, and Sophia go to a pizza joint near the precinct afterwards, and Gina joins them with tiny Indigo, who brightens up the day at least a little bit. Amy ends the night sitting on the stoop of her apartment building with Charles, eating sundaes and sharing memories.

The second day is much more promising, and they all leave exhausted, limping back to their own homes, conserving all of their strengths for the verdict the following day. Amy manages two hours of sleep, but then wakes up from a nightmare where Jake is somehow given the death penalty. She spends the next thirty minutes on Google, trying to find out if there’s any way he could a _ctually_ receive the death penalty, despite being in a state where there is no death penalty, and despite the fact that there’s no way he’d be sentenced to death for his crimes in a state where it was an option, anyway. 

After that, sleep comes in twenty minute intervals between needing to pee and having more nightmares, so she gets up at four-thirty and puts some finishing touches to the scrapbook before getting ready for the day.

It takes the jury five long hours to deliberate, but finally they are ready. Amy sits beside Captain Holt, a determined look in his eyes, and tries her absolute hardest to stop herself from either throwing up or sobbing. Jake, in front of her again, has turned a pasty white colour, and Rosa is pressing her lips together so hard that they have turned purple.

The juror who delivers the verdict is around Amy’s age, wearing a modest white skirt and a black sweater. She tucks loose strands of her blonde hair behind her right ear when she stands up, a wedding ring with a green stone catching the light as she does so. Amy notices because time is slowing down again. Because this is it. This is the moment that she is going to replay in her head over, and over, and over again. This is the moment which will dictate the whole rest of her life. Her hands are shaking, worse than ever before, as she links her fingers together over her bump to try to keep them still. Captain Holt nods at her, once, a message of support and understanding, and then the juror is opening her mouth, and Amy has stopped breathing.

“We the jury, find both of the defendants, Jake Peralta and Rosa Diaz, not guilty.”

The room descends into chaos. There is yelling and clapping and Captain Holt is laughing beside her, but then all Amy knows is that there are arms around her, and tears are pouring out of her eyes, and Jake has vaulted over the bench and is holding her as close as he possibly can with the bump in the way, and he’s kissing her hair and her face and her lips, the salty taste of tears sticking to Amy’s tongue as they cry together.

“I love you,” he tells her, over the chorus of noise from everyone around them. “I love you, and I’m never leaving again.”

Amy reaches for Rosa too, an arm around her shoulders and the bench in between them, and they’re _free_. Tears are welling up in Rosa’s eyes, too, but she pushes them away with the sleeve of her fancy court suit. Before Amy knows it, it’s all of them, everyone she loves, arms around each other in the front rows of the courthouse. It’s been 102 days, at Amy’s best count. And now they have the rest of their lives ahead of them.

\--

Their son is born nine days post-due date. Amy had won the bet. They had opened the envelope with the gender in the first night that Jake had come home, legs tangled together in their bed, one of Jake’s hands resting on Amy’s bump. Jake had tried to pretend to be mad when they read the word ‘boy’, but that had lasted all of three seconds before he returned to kissing her. She’d shown him the scrapbook too, and he’d gone quiet for ten whole minutes as he read through it, and then sobbed into her hair whilst she held him.

By the end of the pregnancy, Amy is so sick of it that she’s taken to pacing the length of the apartment for as long as she can stand it, in an attempt to get things moving. She’s supposed to be on maternity leave but it doesn’t stop her from showing up at the precinct two days before she goes into labour, going out of her mind from being at home with nothing to do. Captain Holt makes her a cup of chamomile tea but she accidentally drops it, smashing the mug into pieces on the break room floor. She starts crying after that, half out of sheer discomfort, and half because:

“I can’t hold a mug of tea, how am I going to hold a _baby_ , Jake? I’m going to drop him. I’m going to be the _worst_ mom. And I – I _don’t think that I can do this_ ,” her words are barely discernible through her tears. Rosa herds Captain Holt and Terry out of the room.

“Hey, no you’re not, Ames. You got this. Hey, look at me,” Jake pulls a chair up in front of hers, sitting down and reaching for her hands. “You’re going to be the _best_ mom. You made all those binders, and our new apartment is totally child safe now, and his room’s all ready. You’re strong, ok? You helped get Rosa and me out of jail, and you got through all those months of cooking a person all by yourself. You’re one of the most badass people I know, babe. And you already love him, so much, right?”

“Of course I do,” Amy sniffs.

“And you’re going to be _amazing_ at this.” He reaches forward to kiss her forehead.

“Jake’s right.” It’s Rosa, walking back into the room, carrying a metal flask. “You got us out of jail, and you took care of us even when you weren’t actually there. This kid is gonna be a walk in the park. You’re going to make him do his homework and Jake’ll make sure he takes enough breaks. And if anyone hurts him, I’ll hurt them back. I don’t care if they’re five years old,” Rosa assures them, proceeding to drops the flask down in front of Amy. “And you can have my herbal tea. This flask isn’t gonna break. And you’re not gonna drop your kid. Gina’s kid is actually pretty cool, so,” Rosa shrugs, “I know your kid will be ok too. You’re way better at all that adult crap than Gina is.”

Amy takes the flask, and Jake mouths a thank you at Rosa over Amy’s head.

When she does go into labour, those two days later, Jake swears it’s down to him. Amy doesn’t sleep a whole lot these days, finally falling asleep this particular night a little after midnight, wearing Jake’s old tactical village shirt (and even that is a tight fit, at this point). Jake’s taken to talking to his son all the time now, a ‘hey, baby’ at breakfast time, or trying to teach him about the Mets, or sometimes whispering to him at night time, his lips close to Amy’s skin. The best thing is that sometimes, when he talks to his son, he kicks, and Jake can see a limb, or feel the movements ripple under his hands. The day that Amy goes into labour, around one a.m., Jake shuffles further down the bed, careful not to disturb her, and whispers to their baby.

“Hey in there,” he begins. “So, you’re eight days late now. And it would be really great if you could come out, because you’re stressing your mom out. The doctor said it isn’t good for you if she gets stressed out, so you’re not doing either of you any favours. But I get it, because you’re safe and warm in there. Maybe you’re a little scared, too, huh?” He whispers into the darkness. “We’re gonna take care of you though. We’ll keep you safe, and never, ever stop fighting on your side. And sure, the world can be a pretty scary place. But you’re gonna love it. And we’re all so excited to meet you. You’ve got the best grandparents, and aunts, and uncles, and cousins in the world, ok? And we’re all rooting for you. There’s so much we have to teach you. We love you. And we’ll hold your hands through the scary parts.”

Jake sits up a little, once he’s finished talking, looking around the room. They’d moved to a new apartment a few months earlier, one with more space for the baby, and just finished decorating their room (the baby’s room had been first, and Jake had spent two days building the crib with the help of six different youtube videos, eventually calling in Charles for reinforcements, who had been only too happy to help.). Their room is painted in neutral colours with something called a _feature wall_ , which really just means covering one of the walls in wallpaper. It’s a little crooked because he had been scared that the wallpaper paste would be toxic for the baby if Amy breathed it in, so he insisted he do it himself.

His favourite things in the room, though, are the little touches that really make it theirs, like the scrapbook Amy had begun for him, which they had completed together, ending with a pumpkin sticker. There’s the pictures too, which they spent a happy afternoon placing into a collage frame. The most recent one is of he and Amy at Captain Holt and Kevin’s second wedding, which Amy had helped to organise, and one of the guests had called ‘the wedding of the season’. The smile hadn’t left her face for at least twelve hours. The oldest is a copy of the picture which hangs in the precinct, of them on the day they tried to out-vulture the vulture, and Amy’s got devil-dog eyes and they’re grinning like idiots. There’s also a picture of them and Sophia and her new boyfriend, out to lunch a few weeks after the trial. He’s told her how grateful he is a hundred times, but none of it ever feels like enough, because without her helping Amy and the rest of the squad he wouldn’t have any of this.   

It’s scary really, thinking about being a dad, because Jake’s was never very good at it. But he’s here, out of prison now, and he’s not planning on leaving again for the rest of his days. Captain Holt had told him that the best thing he can do is to love Amy and love their baby, and that if he does that, it will all work out ok. So that’s what he’s going to do.

Four hours later, Jake wakes up to Amy standing by the window, face crumpled in pain, and an exhausting, exhilarating twenty-six hours later, their son comes into the world with the sunrise.

He has Amy’s dark hair and Jake’s nose, and the tiniest ten toes Jake has ever seen in his life. One hour later, as the sun bleaches the world bright, Jake stands at the window and shows his son the world, and promises that, if nothing else, he’s going to love him for the rest of his days. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, please please please come yell at me about these kids @jakelovesamy on tumblr.

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me about these nerds @jakelovesamy on tumblr.


End file.
